Lumina Desktop 0.9.0 released with desktop compositing

Mr Ken Moore of PC-BSD announced release of Lumina Desktop 0.9.0, latest development release of Fluxbox based, modern, lightweight, user friendly desktop environment for BSD distributions like PC-BSD and FreeBSD. It is expected that, first stable release of Lumina Desktop, version 1.0, will be ready by end of the year aligned with PC-BSD 11.0.

Lumina Desktop 0.9.0 comes with a set of nice features including composting effect(window transparency), a brand new text editor, new set of wall papers ..etc.

Following are changes introduced in Lumina Desktop 0.9.0 since after previous development release, Lumina Desktop 0.8.8.

Visual Changes:

Change the default wallpapers for Lumina/PC-BSD and add some more 4K Lumina wallpapers.

Significant update to lumina-screenshot. Now there is quicksave/open
button for opening a full editor, windows to snapshot may now be
clicked on to select them rather than using the list of open windows,
and screenshots may be cropped as needed within the utility before
saving them to a file.

New Utility: lumina-textedit. This is a simple plaintext editor with
syntax highlighting, find/replace support, line numbers, and bracket
highlighting.

The Lumina theme engine will no longer use stylesheets to modify
non-desktop applications (including the Lumina tools/utilities). This
opens the door for a full Qt5 theme plugin to be used for non-desktop
utilities instead.

Backend Changes:

Update which XDG mime-types are used for the default web browser and
file manager. This should make it align a bit better with what
applications expect (if they try to read/use the database directly –
such as some popular web browsers do).

Fix up a number of multi-monitor issues. Screen resizes/changes will
now be properly detected on the fly (on any system – including VM’s),
and panels will be placed properly on monitors not aligned with the y=0
axis.

Ensure the current system volume gets saved on logout so it can be
reloaded on next login (in case the volume was changed by some external
tool during the session).

New startup binary: “start-lumina-desktop”. This will be used as the
primary “entry point” for launching the desktop as opposed to the
“Lumina-DE” binary (Please adjust your .xinitrc files and wrapper
scripts as needed). The xsession desktop entry that Lumina installs was
already changed to run this tool instead, so graphical desktop managers
should be unaffected by this change. This tool will eventually be used
to perform the X session setup/configuration (so CLI users will not need
to run xinit or startx directly anymore), but the X integration has not
been implemented yet.

Update the FreeBSD appstore shortcut to point to the new appcafe.desktop file from PC-BSD.

Organizational changes:

Cleanup a lot of old shell scripts from the source tree (not needed for builds any more)

Streamline the build procedures a little bit.

Completely reorganize the source tree. Now all the Lumina
tools/utilities are kept separate from the general build scripts/files
within a src-qt5 directory, and additionally organized into categories
(core, core-utils, desktop-utils). Automated build systems should not be
impacted by this change, as the main project file (lumina.pro) has been
left in the same place within the repository and just had all the
internal paths adjusted accordingly.

Bug Fixes:

Make all the installed desktop entries use relative paths for the icons (better cross-OS support).

Fix up the detection of “sloppy” URL’s given to lumina-open.

Adjust one of the include files for the Lumina library so that now
external applications can link against the lib without the availability
of the Lumina source tree (although still not recommended).

Stability fix for the desktop when an invalid desktop plugin is set/registered.